In reply to KTS915.

Well - normally you have a thumbnail already, a medium size and a large size for your images. You can define these sizes yourself and If you need more sizes you can have more. Within your theme you can always define a standard image that fits best.

The problem we are faced to is the same problem as you might have had it with your TV (receiver) already, when it jumped from normal size to HD Ready or Full HD. May be you try to use 4k technology (Ultra HD) already for some films but they have to be scaled up because they can not be delivered in that quality. In the result you can not enjoy your film in the highest possible quality right now.

As mobile device companies love to play with 'high density marketing campaigns' and people still believe it is much better to download double sized, tripple sized or even larger pictures and buy those devices, they definitely will need the larger pictures to get their pictures sharp on new devices.

In the end you will have to deliver lots of different image sizes and especially mobile devices will cause more and more (data) traffic because they don`t ask for the standard image that fits best but for the large ones. ;-)

I would suggest to call it 'design optimization' (to sharpen the pictures) as you can not tell devices with low bandwidth connections that they better do not load the large pics. I have not heard about 'intelligent browsers' yet that check connection speeds before requesting high density images (if available).

So in my opinion adaptive images have been cool before the mobile devices started to waste more and more bandwidth. It`s a bit tricky. ;-)